CHALLENGES OF PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN NURSING
INTRODUCTION
An effective employee is a combination of a good skill set and a productive work environment. Many factors affect employee performance that managers need to be aware of and should work to improve at all times. These include a lack of recognition of employees who are performing well, quality performance outcomes and an absence of a formal performance management system and poor working conditions (Awases, Bezuidenhout & Roos, 2013).
Over the last 20 years, a number of strategies aimed at improving the job performance of health workers have been implemented in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) (Marchal et al. 2012). Each strategy has had its specific perspective and focused on one particular issue: quality improvement, performance management, building learning organisations, innovation diffusion, to mention but a few (Chopra et al. 2008). While success has been reported in some cases, there is increasing acknowledgement that to improve performance of health workers especially nurses and health care organisations in general, approaches that deal with one problem, mostly fall short or obtain only short-term results (Marchal et al. 2010). The concern about shortage of nurses and it potential effect on quality of nursing care rendered as well as the mounted public urge on quality and excellent performance in the health sector mandates the Human Resource Management as part of their core function to ensure that an effective system of monitoring, measuring and evaluating performance of health workers especially nurses is in place. This in effect will maximise the potential of employees and improve upon the quality of health service delivery. Nurses form the majority of the health sector workforce, hence the performance of the organization depends on their overall performance. Studies have found that when